There are miles and miles of unused railroad track from which the rails need to be taken so that the steel can be reprocessed and used for other purposes. Often the wooden ties can also be salvaged to be used for other purposes.
In the past, in taking up railroad track from the bed, the handling of the extremely long lengths of rail has presented a substantial problem. Traditionally, it has been thought necessary that the steel rails need to be cut with an acetylene torch. Such cutting of the rails proves to be extremely expensive because it is extremely time consuming and wasteful of significant amounts of fuel.
As a result, the rails are handled in long lengths, and the handling of such long lengths requires the use of extremely heavy equipment for lifting, loading and transporting the rails.
Scrap yards have collected long lengths of rails for processing in such scrap yards. They have actually tried to break such rails by placing a rail over a fulcrum or the edge of an anvil such that the base flange of the rail rests upon a support at one side of the anvil and the rail extends substantially horizontally, as a cantilever, in the other direction from the anvil, whereupon the one end is held downwardly against the support or anvil; and the cantilever end is pressed downwardly as to break the rail over the edge of the anvil or at the fulcrum. Although some rails have been broken in this way, considerable difficulty is experienced in handling and holding down the rails and in the actual breaking of the cantilever ends of the rails.